[klingon78]

When and how do you transition from thinking/marketing/etc. to building?

And how do you handle situations where:

(1) you know you must ship, but it’s not good enough?

(2) you know you must think/market/etc., but you’re building?

[mmcdermott]

A lot of it comes down to being intentional. You can only fit so many features (functional and non-functional) into any given time window. So you are either selecting the features and allowing the time window to expand to accommodate it or removing features to hit the window. There can be some negotiation for sure, but those are your levers.

I think staring this fundamental truth in the face goes a long way. Very few projects can allow the development window to expand indefinitely. A startup needs customers and feedback, even if only for another funding round. An established company generally has deadlines driven directly or indirectly by customers. Both can slip a little, but not indefinitely. Not all features are strictly necessary. So you optimize for time and importance.

The hardest thing to get over is that you will never think it's good enough because it could always be better. But existence is a feature. The ultimate feature. So you'll have to ship an imperfect product and iterate. Experience usually gives better hand-holds on shipping something.

I also tend to find that half-features please no one. You're better off either finishing something or cutting it.

[hazz99]

I'm the most dysfunctional wannabe founder ever, so I am 100% not qualified to answer this :)

With that said, I think product/solution ambiguity is rooted in confusion about the problem being solved. It comes from starting with an idea, and not a painful problem that people already experience. Alternatively, from a problem that exists, but is incredibly ill-defined.

It would be disingenuous for me to comment further, because I'm still learning! My view is it's easy to create a solution, but really hard to find & well-define a really painful problem.

[klingon78]

My biggest problem is thinking instead of building.

I’ve had and still have some great ideas, and that’s all they amounted to thus far.

When I’ve started to build, I get stuck spending a lot of time to produce very little, because I try to implement a novel way to do something simple that no one would want while deploying it easily and handling requests quickly.

My greatest dream is that I write something eventually that actually works and that people would want to use.

My greatest fear is that either that no one would use it, because I don’t need it or understand the need for it, or that it would work, not scale, and I’d have leveraged everything and let everyone and myself down.

Also, execution bores me. It’s more fun ideating, thinking and analyzing, but I’d like to be responsible for creating things that are interesting and solve problems or make life better.

I’m unsure where the risk-averse creative fits into a startup CEO role.

[throwaway98797]

Your fear assures your fate.

Accept that is the case and let yourself code anyways. Then you may end up being surprised by what you can accomplish.